[The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad]@TWC D-Link book
The Secret Agent

CHAPTER III
16/41

It should be as careful as the education given to kings.

He would have it advance its tenets cautiously, even timidly, in our ignorance of the effect that may be produced by any given economic change upon the happiness, the morals, the intellect, the history of mankind.

For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions--art, philosophy, love, virtue--truth itself! The coals in the grate settled down with a slight crash; and Michaelis, the hermit of visions in the desert of a penitentiary, got up impetuously.

Round like a distended balloon, he opened his short, thick arms, as if in a pathetically hopeless attempt to embrace and hug to his breast a self-regenerated universe.

He gasped with ardour.
"The future is as certain as the past--slavery, feudalism, individualism, collectivism.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books